I just wanted to share this cool video that truly embodies the term “creative placemaking” courtesy of WFPL.
Artist Matthew Mazzotta used materials from a blighted house in York, Alabama that was being torn down to construct a house that can be “unrolled” to make a 100 seat public performance space on the same lot the old house sat.
You can read about the project and some of the travails it faced, view pictures and watch other videos of the process.
Economist Alex Tabarrok has written about the fact that the primary activity of firefighters is no longer fighting fires. Fires are less frequent than in the past thanks to building codes and other preventative measures so municipalities are finding additional tasks for fire fighters to perform.
What caught my eye was his comments:
“…explains it in terms of what’s called the “March of Dimes problem.” When polio was defeated, the March of Dimes, started under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the disease, suddenly had no reason to exist. “They were actually successful, and it was something they never planned for,” said Tabarrok. “But instead of disbanding the organization, they set it onto a whole bunch of other tasks…and so it’s kind of lost its focus. It’s no longer easy to evaluate whether it’s doing a good job or not.”
This immediately brought two things to mind. First, that this was a good illustration of the value of embracing the idea of building an expiration date into your organization at the time of formation.
The other thing it evoked was the oft expressed warning against chasing funding for projects outside the scope of your core purpose just because the funding exists. Not only does it cause an organization to lose focus, but as Tabarrok notes, it is difficult to evaluate if your work is really effective any more.
It occurred to me that one of the benefits of building a planned expiration into your organization is the ability to declare a win. That is something that non-profits don’t often get the opportunity to do given the way they are often structured.
If you read about the vision behind arts organizations with expiration dates, achieving the expiration condition doesn’t necessarily need to result in an absolute dissolution.
In many cases, it can just be an opportunity to reorganize a similar group of people to address a new project without feeling an obligation to perpetuate anything from the previous entity. In many respects, it contributes to organization evolution by discarding what didn’t work or is no longer relevant and allowing experimentation with some new ideas.
I recently got a little lesson in how easy it is to apply criteria to other people that you resist having applied to yourself.
This weekend I was listening to a recent episode of This American Life which was covering the efforts of an organization called Give Directly which gives money directly to the poorest people in a country, in this case, Kenya, on the belief that they know best how to spend it.
Despite all the problems you might assume might arise, things seem to be going very well with the program.
Still, the founders were all grad students at MIT and Harvard so they are all about hard data. They weren’t satisfied with the anecdotal evidence of outcomes they found in their research. The organization is doing exhaustive research conducting surveys that take an entire day to administer to measure the differences in outcomes between those who receive funds and those who don’t.
This American Life also talked to people from Heifer International who give cows and training raising and caring for them, to people in developing countries. Their program sound incredibly beneficial. The cows are so big and healthy, the reporters talked about how intimidated they were by them.
The reporters mentioned that the people at Give Directly would like charities like Heifer International to do studies to determine what program design was most effective. The reporter asks a Heifer representative (around 30 minute mark) if they would consider giving cows and training to one village and then give the money they would spend on cows and training, to another village to see what was more effective.
The woman representing Heifer said that sounded too much like an experiment and you can’t do that with the lives of real people.
The reporter says he imagines the Give Directly people would respond “that we have to do experiments because that is the only way to figure out the very best way to help people.”
The Heifer representative spoke about it not being that linear and that there are some elements that are not easily quantified by the limits of data.
I immediately found myself siding with the Give Directly people. You are never going to be able to serve everyone who needs help. So if you are providing cows to one village and money to another, at least you aren’t setting up a control group that doesn’t get anything beneficial which is the case with most experiments. (control group getting sugar pills, other group getting the medicine).
And actually, that is how Give Directly is conducting their study–with a control group that doesn’t receive any support at all.
However, it only took about 15 seconds to realize that I was hearing very familiar language being used. How often have people in the arts talked about the benefits of what they do not being easily measured and provided anecdotes about smiling faces and lives changed? I know one acting teacher who yelled at a curriculum committee for trying to apply concrete measures to his classes.
Just recently GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the Wise Giving Alliance got together to ask that overhead not be used as a metric for deciding what charities to support.
Yet with the increased focus on quantifiable results with things like K12 test scores and college four year graduation rates, Give Directly’s model may become a more prevalent one in the future.
The good news is that they give money without any application process or strings attached. The bad news is that it is according to their own criteria.
A grass roof on your house qualified you to receive support from Give Directly in Kenya. If you had a better roof, you didn’t receive any money. A very slim distinction the story admits, between the very poorest and the slightly less poor.
I think we can all admit there are inefficiencies in the way non-profit arts organizations are run that could benefit from good evidence based criteria. However, I don’t think it is a self-deceptive rationalization to believe that what is effective for an art organization in Chicago will be quite different from one in the rural southwest.
This is not to say groups like Give Directly will formulate a one-size-fits-all giving formula. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if hard number results become viewed as an increasingly more important measure of success.
As I wrote about two years ago, Warren Buffett’s grandson, Howard Warren Buffett, has been talking about non-profits merging to become more efficient and solution oriented instead of problem oriented.
Warren Buffett’s son, (Howard Warren Buffett’s uncle), recently derided what he called “The Charitable-Industrial Complex” which criticized transplanting solutions with “little regard for culture, geography or societal norms.” He too calls for a better way of doing things.
Both are more directly referring to work that is being done in the developing world, but criteria applied in one sector will inevitably migrate to another. Talking about the unmeasurable benefits of the arts is only going to so convincing. It would be wise to acknowledge problems, pay attention and participate in the conversation so that others are not proposing solutions for you in your absence.
I was reading an article on The Atlantic about why employers often have a hard time finding workers even during periods of high unemployment.
I saw the sentence, “And workers now really need to think of learning as a lifelong task.” My mind made a leap and it occurred to me that might be the message the arts need to ride the coattails of.
People are changing jobs more frequently now, either involuntarily, or as we are told of Gen Y, out of a desire to do something meaningful. I am sure there will be a lot of articles and news stories over the next few years about how people need to be more agile and keep renewing and reviewing their knowledge and skills.
Keeping in line with this sentiment, the arts community could talk about how gaining knowledge, skills, comfort with artistic experiences and pursuits is something that is easily acquired over time. (Instead of a panicked crash course at the concert hall doors.)
Two hurdles that must be overcome are the perception that the arts are an indulgence and that learning is an onerous chore.
This provides an opportunity to advocate for arts education by pointing out that learning in an artistic/creative context provides the sense of fun that makes the experience more enjoyable. And in fact, may assist in keeping them engaged in the process of maintaining their professional/vocational skills.
There is a great proliferation of information sources for self-directed learning about the arts that don’t require one to expose themselves to the elements of the event attendance experience that intimidate- blogs, online videos, websites, classes, lectures, master classes and volunteering. People just need to be made better aware of them.